On our return to our station, I began regular classes for pastors and local preachers at four centres--two in the northern portion of the district, and two in the southern. To these I went once a fortnight, going to one north and one south every week. My wife was able to go with me to these centres, and have sewing-classes with the women and girls. Travelling as I now did on horseback, she was able to have my former bearers. At all the four centres she had large and most interesting classes, of about fifty women and girls. She had also her sewing-class at Fìhàonana twice a week. We found, however, that we had in our zeal attempted too much. My wife suffered for it afterwards. A journey of twelve miles twice a week under a tropical sun--trying even in the cold season--in addition to domestic duties, and all the other work of the week at a mission station, proved too much for her, and no wonder. Of the state of the village schools (1873–1875) little can be said, and the less the better. Poor at best, they had been allowed to drift to ruin, and all my former toil and trouble over them seemed wasted. And yet there were signs of a growing interest in elementary education on the part of the people, which had only to be laid hold of, and directed into proper channels, to be made serviceable. Schools would not rise of themselves in Madagascar, any more than anywhere else. That they could be raised and kept up was afterwards proved. I had the honour and satisfaction--no small satisfaction to me--of doing what had never before been done, and has never been done since, namely, of raising forty-four new schools during seven months, and gathering two thousand four hundred children into them! It was certainly about the hardest seven months’ work I have ever done, and perhaps I know what hard work means; but it was well worth doing. These schools were kept up for five years, until we were driven home on furlough, after being again and again prostrated by malarial fever. Instead of some hundred and fifty, old and young, whom we found able to read the Word of God, when we settled in the district in 1871, we left three thousand able to do so, and in possession of the Book--no bad ten years’ work of itself, even if we had done nothing else.